The National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Integrative Organismal Systems awarded a $277,978 Project Grant under the Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) to the University of California, Berkeley. The 3-year grant, beginning on Sep 1, 2023, aims to develop new tools and resources to enable more efficient gene editing in maize, the world's most produced crop. Specifically, the project will generate maize lines that constitutively express the Cas9 gene editing enzyme and engineer...
This $322,020 Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Division of Integrative Organismal Systems will support collaborative research at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) to develop improved methods for CRISPR/Cas9-based gene editing in maize. The key objectives are to generate maize lines expressing high levels of Cas9 nuclease and to engineer and optimize viral vectors to efficiently deliver guide RNAs for both somatic and heritable gene editing. This...
The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a $800,000 Project Grant under its Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) to The Regents of the University of California, doing business as University of California, Berkeley. The grant funding will support collaborative research to discover and characterize compact CRISPR gene editing systems that can be encoded in plant viruses. This will enable more efficient and widespread deployment of genome editing capabilities across a variety of crop...
The National Science Foundation's Biological Sciences program awarded a $1,200,000 project grant to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Office of Research Administration to discover and characterize small CRISPR genome editing systems for virus-based delivery into plants. This 3-year project aims to develop new tools to enhance plant breeding and create crops with higher yields, drought resistance, and pest/temperature tolerance. The work includes screening metagenomic data to...
This $959,997 federal Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) supports research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) to understand the molecular mechanisms underlying plant regeneration, with a focus on maize. The goal is to identify key genes and pathways that regulate the ability of plant cells to reprogram and develop into new plants, which is particularly challenging for some crop species. The research will exploit a...
The University of California, Davis (UC Davis) has been awarded a $300,000 EAGER (Early-concept Grants for Exploratory Research) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences. The grant supports a project to investigate the use of CRISPR gene editing technology to separate closely linked beneficial and harmful traits in plants. Specifically, the project aims to determine whether eliminating certain DNA repair pathways, such as the Ku-dependent...
The National Science Foundation awarded a $307,400 Project Grant under its Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) to the University of Missouri System to develop epigenetic editing tools for improving crop plants. The project aims to expand the capabilities of genome editing by enabling targeted changes in gene expression, rather than just DNA sequence, to generate novel traits in important crops like rice and tomato. Key objectives include adapting the epigenetic editing approach...
This federal Project Grant award of $1,192,499.00 from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) supports research by the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in Missouri to develop epigenetic editing tools for crop improvement. The key objectives of this 4-year project are to: 1) Expand epigenetic editing technologies to other crop species beyond cassava, such as rice and tomato, to enable disease resistance; 2) Demonstrate additional applications of...
This three-year, $1.8 million project grant from the National Science Foundation Division of Integrative Organismal Systems aims to develop rapid transformation and gene editing techniques in maize through the Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074). The University of Missouri System will work to establish a system for precisely inserting transgenes and editing genes at predetermined sites in the genome of maize. Researchers will create "landing pads" on five chromosomes of a...
This Project Grant award in the amount of $1,211,545.00 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) aims to develop highly efficient and robust Prime Editing (PE) systems in rice, tomato, and poplar plants. PE is a cutting-edge CRISPR/Cas gene editing technology that enables precise replacement, addition, or removal of specific DNA sequences. The project objectives are to optimize PE proteins, improve PE guide RNA structure and expression, and modify...